Zooplastic Grafts. - The British Medical Journal (London), 1888, Feb 18, 1(1416): 367.
Zooplastic Grafts. - The Medical News (Philadelphia), 1888, Mar 17, 52(11): 296.
Surgeons are familiar with skin grafting in the human subject, but it is rather a novel procedure to substitute the skin of birds and poultry for snips from the patient's own healthy skin. Wiesmann twice transplanted skin from pigeon to pigeon with success, and three times from fowl to fowl. Under the title of Dermepenthesis, Mr. G. F. Cadogan-Masterman published some interesting cases a few weeks since in our columns, in which he had succeeded in utilizing the skin of young wild rabbits for the purpose, of bringing about the cicatrisation of raw and ulcerating surfaces. Several others have repeated and varied Wiesmann's experiments, but before Mr. Masterman none of them seem to have been enterprising enough to spare their patients the disagreeable snipping incidental to the operation as it is usually practiced. At about the same time Dr. Redard communicated to the Paris Academy of Medicine some observations of his own with animal grafts on wounds in human beings. In a case of severe bum of the scalp of eight months' standing, in a child 2 years of age, he obtained a rapid cicatrisation by means of grafts from a fowl. He, first tried grafts of frog's skin, but as these proved to be repulsive to patients, and did not give very good results, he substituted others from the fowl, and the wound, which measured three, inches by two and a half, had completely healed in two months. He had been equally successful in other and subsequent cases. He takes the skin from beneath the wing of a chicken, carefully securing the subjacent cellular tissue, but avoiding adipose tissue. The transplanted pieces varied from a sixth to a third of an inch in size, and they were maintained in position by means of a little cotton-wool and iodoform gauze. The skin of birds and fowls has the advantage of being supple, delicate, and vascular; it adapts itself readily to the surface of the wound, and adheres without undergoing absorption.

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